


run through the halls of your high school

by avoidfilledwithcelluloid



Category: Quantum Leap
Genre: Gay as hell, Gen, High School Teacher AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-26
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-04-17 07:04:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4657167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avoidfilledwithcelluloid/pseuds/avoidfilledwithcelluloid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One thing that could be said about the drama room: it smelled condemned. Al sat back in the same chair he’d been sitting in since he’d started teaching drama at Elk Ridge High. The email on his crummy school supplied PC screen flickered with an eerie buzz, the perfect soundtrack to the frankly terrible news contained therein. <br/>“Hm,” he pressed his steepled fingers to his lips, “Well ain’t that a kick in the ass.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	run through the halls of your high school

**Author's Note:**

> thank u to @yearofmeteors and @dorothy_notgale and this one anon on me blog for giving me ideas. i love your ideas and i took them and shoved them in a blender so that i could make this mess. this is so gay i'm dying.
> 
> i hope you like it anyway.

One thing that could be said about the drama room: it smelled condemned. Al sat back in the same chair he’d been sitting in since he’d started teaching drama at Elk Ridge High. The email on his crummy school supplied PC screen flickered with an eerie buzz, the perfect soundtrack to the frankly terrible news contained therein.

“Hm,” he pressed his steepled fingers to his lips, “Well ain’t that a kick in the ass.”

Placing his hands on the edge of his desk, Al shoved himself back and then reached down for the lower most locked drawer. He took the key from his pocket, turned it in the creaking lock and pulled out a half full bottle of bourbon along with the tumbler he kept next to it. Slamming the bottle down, Al frowned at the email. It sat in a blue electric haze smug as anything. He poured himself two fingers in the glass and before knocking it back moved the tumbler in a circle. It swirled and he read the email again.

_Due to the current budgetary situation, we are electing to downsize the drama department’s budget—_

Al poured himself another drink.

_A meeting has been scheduled to discuss the continuance of drama department at the high school—_

Jesus Christ. The email should have included a picture of his head in a guillotine with the blade mid-chop. An impulse ran through his brain and Al clicked the reply button. A thousand, no, wait, a million destructive options for retaliation were whirring at the back of his head. Then he looked over at the still to be emptied bottle.

There was a more destructive option still.

…

A shower of sparkling glass exploded the minute his hammer hit the vending machine. Al shut his eyes, stumbling back from the impact. When he opened them some of the glass had imbedded itself in his knuckles. The hammer swung back and hit a soft blow to his leg. He leant back against the wall, eyes closed. His hand was bleeding slow and his head hurt.

“Jesus,” he said and then heard the scuffle of tennis shoes on linoleum, “Aw shit.”

“Mr. Calavicci?” Al opened one and spied, coming toward him, a lanky figure in jeans and a worn tee shirt. As the figure came closer he could see the shirt had YALE emboldened across the chest. They bent down and offered him a hand. Al made a spit logged noise and waved the hand away.

“Christ kid,” he said, not looking further than the person’s casual clothes to denote them as a foetus, “Don’t call me that.”

“Oh sorry,” they let their body drop into a crouch next to him. Al looked closer at the face. Oh god, he recognized that face. It was the damn darling of the faculty lounge: Dr. Beckett. Some physics whiz kid who’d carted himself out of Indiana to MIT at sixteen and then after collecting more than a fair amount of doctorates had decided to slum it back at his high school trying to make teenagers care about perpetual motion machines. Al wanted to curl his lip in disgust. Dr. Whiz Kid wasn’t going to be getting any fucking _budgetary cuts_ emails anytime soon.

And what stung was that Al had been at this school since he’d got his teaching degree. He’d given half his life to all of the scared kids who came warily into the drama room hoping to find some place where they wouldn’t be laughed out. He was a damn institution, drama was a damn institution and now he was on the knife’s edge of getting the boot.

“Mr. Calavicci,” Beckett said and then winced, “Sorry, sorry. Look, are you okay? You really did a number on the machine and, oh man, you smell really bad. I’m sorry, you just do.”

“It didn’t have my favorite chips,” Al said, “Had to kick the machine’s ass. Otherwise, how is it going to learn its lesson?”

“The lesson being,” Beckett said, “that it should always have your chips?”

“Exactamundo.” Al said and snapped a finger gun at Beckett who, to his surprise, started to laugh. Al was an expert at interpreting laughs, had thrown enough hooks out at bars to beautiful women to know when a laugh was genuine and when it was mocking. This laugh was the real McCoy. You could always tell someone’s real laugh if the sound was ugly.

“Oh alright,” he said and leaned back, falling onto his ass so he was sitting right next to Al on the floor, “Well I hope it worked.”

“Me too,” Al said and then, “What the hell are you doing here so late?”

“Me?” Beckett sounded surprised, “I’m trying to get this project done for tomorrow. I mean, I’m writing the lesson plan up and it’s just so hard you know? Well, maybe you don’t know. Its hard to sort of explain things sometimes.”

“What? Like thermal dynamics?” Al pulled the words out of his ass; he had no fucking clue what Beckett actually taught.

“Um, yeah,” Beckett rubbed the back of his head, “Well, no, because that’s not what I’m teaching but yes in that the concept is sort of—,“ he spread his hands out wide, “big like thermal dynamics. I’m trying to get these kids to understand something that is huge and complicated and I just can’t.”

He tucked his long legs up to his chest. For a second Beckett looked exactly like a sixteen year old. Al had seen a lot of sixteen year olds past through the school’s halls and knew that look: the look of failed expectations.

“Well, uh, kid,” he said, reaching out to pat Beckett’s knee, “You just gotta, uh, take some time to really, um, review the facts—“

Shit, this would have been easier to do if he wasn’t navigating through the six shots of bourbon sloshing in his head. Beckett didn’t seem to notice. His attention was focused on Al’s hand covering his knee. He sighed loudly.

“It’s not that,” he said and ran his hand through his hair, “They don’t care.”

“Who?”

“The students,” Beckett said and then made a face like he’d been louder than intended, “They come in thinking I’m going to be some kind of wizard, some kind of cool fun guy and then a week into class half of them aren’t even showing up and the ones that do—“ his eyes got wide and Al spied tears forming at the edges of them, “They text, they fall asleep. I had a student last week who threw a spitball at me. An actual spitball!”

He shivered. Al felt almost bad about the nasty thoughts he’d had about Beckett.

“I think they hate me,” he said in a whisper.

“They don’t hate you,” Al said on instinct. It was always the first thing he said. There was always a handful of teacher who he’d stumbled on crying in the men’s room or in the hallway worried that they weren’t doing anything right. Al liked to think that he was something of a guardian angel for these poor souls; in his more angry moments he thought about how he was probably the harbinger of doom. Keeping fresh eyed teachers in the hell of high school until their classes got budget cut emails too, “Look. They’re kids. Kids don’t want to care about things. They get that shit beaten out of them in middle school so they come here thinking that anything that makes them happy is lame and they have to be angry to be cool. You can’t think that way. You’ve got to be the one who gives them their ability to care back.”

Beckett made a noise into his hands. Al looked away when he lifted his face from them, trying to be polite and not notice that Beckett’s eyes were puffy. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

“Thanks,” he said and leaned his head on Al’s shoulder. The feeling sent a shock wave up Al’s arm, “I needed— I needed to hear that.”

The hallways of the high school were quiet except for the needlepoint sound of the vending machines broken whine. Beckett folded his hands together, head still warm against Al. This wasn’t uncomfortable so much as it felt out of place in their tableau. If Al had been directing this scene he would have removed the glass around them and would have replaced the actor playing him. This one was too stiff and refused to look at Beckett in some sort of panic reaction to physical closeness. Instead he stared straight ahead at the jagged hole he’d made in the machine glass.

“Do you want to hear something funny?” Beckett huffed another genuine laugh, this one more gruff than the last one, “I was in your class when I went here.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I loved it. I mean, okay, I was a terrible actor. I think you told me that it was okay that I couldn’t act to save my life because, uh, ‘you don’t have the face for it’.”

“Shit,” Al said, shifting his position so he could face Beckett, “Did I really tell you that?”

“Yes!” Beckett said, grinning, “You did! You said that my face was too truthful. That I couldn’t make myself feel things I didn’t already feel. Funny way to pay a compliment but I still took the class.”

“Huh,” Al said. Beckett started to twist his fingers together in a nervous hum of activity.

“Actually I think I kept taking it because I had a horrible crush on you,” he said and Al could feel his face go hot, “I was so obvious. My brother used to make fun of me, you know, always taking my scripts and telling me that they were making me queer. But I don’t think it really stopped anything.”

“Well,” Al said, “I’m sure you’ve changed since then.”

“I guess. I still,” Beckett went a light shade of pink, “I still sort of have the crush. I’m sure you get a lot of students that do.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Al waved his hand. Suddenly the email floated back to him, “Not enough apparently.”

“Hm?”

“Oh,” Al said, “Drama’s getting cut. Got the email today.”

Beckett shot up. His face had gone from blushing to something made up of furrowed brows and wide eyes.

“They can’t!”

“They can. They did.”

“I,” Beckett said and looked to his side, “I won’t let them.”

“You won’t let them?” Al snorted, “Kid, you can’t make those idiots do anything once they’ve got the rotten idea in their heads.”

“No, you don’t understand,” a terrible and scheming smiled revealed itself on Beckett’s face, “I can make them change their minds. Look, you know how everyone made a big deal out of me coming back? It’s because this is the only way that Elk Ridge could get more funding. If I walk it all goes—,” he curled his hand into a ball and then opened it quickly, fingers spayed out, “poof! So if I threaten to leave if they cut drama—“

He shrugged his shoulders. The way Al was staring at him didn’t displace his smile; in fact if Al was to make a guess his slack jawed response only made Beckett’s excited cruelty grow. Dr. Whiz Kid looked enormously pleased with himself.

“You’re too much,” Al said and laughed despite himself, “Jesus. You’d really do that?”

“Of course!” Beckett’s response was excited, “Mr. Calavicci, I would do anything to keep your classes around.”

Then he went a deep shade of red, throwing his hand over his mouth.

“Don’t bust a blood vessel there kid,” Al said. He pushed himself up, wincing when he used the hand with glass in it, and then offered his other hand to Beckett, “And please, for fuck’s sake, call me Al. You make me feel skeevy when you call me Mr. Calavicci.”

“Okay,” Beckett took his hand, “You can, um, you can call me Sam.”

“Alright Sam,” Al said. God, this kid was a giant. Al felt all of his five feet and six inches manifold next to Sam’s tree trunk height.

Sam grinned and then, seizing Al’s glass ridden hand, got a clinical look on his face.

“You’re bleeding,” he said and Al nodded, “I have a first aid kit in my classroom. I can fix you up there, if that’s okay.”

“Hm,” Al said in acknowledgement. He couldn’t look straight at Sam; it was like staring into the god damn sun. Instead he watched his hand turn Al’s over, finger testing the depth of the glass shard by tapping on it. There was a remarkable grace to which Sam handled the injury which could have probably been attributed to the medical doctorate he had hiding somewhere in the brown mop of his hair, “You do that. Maybe I can look over your lesson plans? Just to, you know, give ya’ a little support.”

“Oh yeah,” Sam said and when Al looked at him from the side of his eye he was beaming, “That’d be great.”

**Author's Note:**

> are you, like me, a lover of dana scully? mayhaps you should follow my [tumblr](http://avoidfilledwithcelluloid.tumblr.com/)


End file.
